NSSDC Earth Science

Nimbus Program

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA

The Nimbus satellites were second-generation meteorological research and development
(R&D) spacecraft designed to serve as stablized, earth-oriented platforms for the
testing of advanced systems to sense and collect atmospheric science data. Seven
Nimbus spacecraft have been launched into near-polar, sun-synchronous orbits beginning
with Nimbus 1 on August 28, 1964. The operation history of the Nimbus satellites are
listed in Table 1 below.

On board the Nimbus satellites are various instrumentation for imaging, sounding, and
other studies in different spectral regions. Table 2 summarizes the
Nimbus instruments.
For more information about the Nimbus spacecraft, experiments and data sets, please
choose from the following: